More than 30 years ago, 17-year-old Roger Ellison was last seen in the basement of Cedaredge High School.

There has been no sign of the popular student since then. His mysterious disappearance has remained one of the enduring missing persons mysteries in Colorado, filled with sightings of Roger across the country and even a death bed revelation about two hunters finding a tied up boy in the woods.

Roger Ellison, 17

Roger was an A-student, a gifted athlete and had plans to attend Western State College the following fall.

His disappearance has been considered suspicious for many years now.

When he vanished, Roger had $1,000 in savings left in his bank account. He had already paid an entry fee for a ski race at Aspen for the next weekend. Left behind were his car, his motorcycle and his skis, according to numerous articles, including several by Denver Post staff writer Nancy Lofholm.

Roger was a member of the Powderhorn Racing Club. He was working to attain “A” level racer status in the United States Ski Association. Like his older sister, he wanted to be a U.S. Ski Team member.

He lived with his parents in Eckert near the Grand Mesa National Forest and was the youngest of five children.

The last morning he was reportedly seen was Feb. 10, 1981. He was only a month away from turning 18 on March 11.

Roger had stood at the kitchen door that morning and told his mother Evelyn that the snow-heavy sky was a good omen for the ski race he planned to compete in that weekend.

He picked up his books, $3 for lunch and his yellow backpack, and hopped on the school bus, as he did every morning, for the 6-mile ride to Cedaredge High School.

The last time anyone ever saw him, he was getting his books from locker No. 191 and telling his lockermate and friend, Mitch Coleman, he would catch up with him in class.

He didn’t make it to class. He never returned home that day.

“We knew something was wrong when he didn’t get off the school bus that afternoon. We drove all over the country looking for him,” Roger’s mother later told a reporter. “I notified the sheriff’s office right away. All they said was, ‘He’s just run away with a girlfriend. He’ll be back.”

But she knew Roger didn’t have a girlfriend. He was somewhat of a loner. After school he would stay home with his parents or work part-time jobs to earn money for college or ski events. He had competed in Telluride the weekend before. He had been disappointed when he didn’t make the racing team.

“He had to be better than anybody,” Evelyn said at the time.

She knew he wasn’t about to run away, not with the Aspen competition coming up the next weekend.

The day after Roger disappeared the Ellisons returned to the sheriff’s office, but the response was the same as the day before: deputies showed little concern about Roger’s whereabouts. The Ellisons were frustrated.

They believed that someone who knew their family had fallen on hard times financially may have lured him away from the school with the offer of a job. He was seen talking with two older men at the Cedaredge school about a week before his disappearance.

It would be the Cedaredge Police Department that first opened a missing person case.

Among the people interviewed was high school teacher John Pash. His home next to the high school was searched. No clues were found, though.

But Evelyn still held out hope that any day she would look up and her son would be in the doorway asking what was for supper, as he had always done before.

Every day she would wake up thinking that that day she would find her son. It never happened.

The Ellisons turned the search for their son into a full-time job. They drove around the state, slowing down to look at hitchhikers. They hung out at ski meets. They waited on bridges and along highways where people thought they had spotted Roger.

Evelyn Ellison theorized that religious fanatics or drug dealers lured Roger away, but there was nothing in his background or behavior indicated he was involved in such things.

Posters and flyers were distributed. Roger’s face appeared on milk cartons with his personal statistics: he was 5-feet-11 and weighed 145 pounds. He had dark blond hair and blue eyes.

If the family had the money they would have paid to have abandoned mines in the area checked or reservoirs drained. They did offer an $8,000 reward for information explaining what happened to their son.

That same spring that Roger disappeared Ernest Ellison died, many believe of a broken heart.

Before he died, he stood at the curb every day for months waiting for the school bus that used to drop Roger off. The driver said Ellison would scan the students getting off. Then he would hang his head and cry.

He was 58 and died of a heart attack.

“It was really hard on both of us. We were just crazy,” Evelyn Ellison later told reporter Paula Massa Anderson, who wrote a story for The Denver Post.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.